Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics

Pragmatist Stories of Progress

Ulf Schulenberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9798765102435
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765102459
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Presenting pragmatist humanism as a form of anti-authoritarianism, this book sheds light on the contemporary significance of pragmatist aesthetics and the revival of humanism.

This interdisciplinary study shows that a mediation between pragmatist aesthetics – which emphasizes the significance of creating, making, and inventing – and Marxist materialist aesthetics – which values form – promises interesting results and that the former can learn from the latter.

In doing so, Ulf Schulenberg discusses 3 layers of the multi-layered phenomenon that is the revival of humanism: He first explains the potential of a pragmatist humanism, clarifying the contemporary significance of humanism. He then argues that pragmatist humanism is a form of anti-authoritarianism. Finally, he shows the possibility of bringing together the resurgence of humanism and a renewed interest in the work of aesthetic form by arguing that pragmatist aesthetics needs a more complex conception of form.

Establishing a transatlantic theoretical dialogue, Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Literary Aesthetics brings together literary and aesthetic theory, philosophy, and intellectual history. It discusses a broad range of authors – from Emerson, Whitman, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Dewey to Wittgenstein, Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Latour, and Rorty – to illuminate how humanism, pragmatism, and anti-authoritarianism are interlinked.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Humanism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Form
• 2 “We Have No Duties to Anything Nonhuman”: Richard Rorty’s Anti-Authoritarianism
• 3 Pragmatism, Humanism, and Form
• 4 “… and the Practice Has to Speak for Itself”: Wittgenstein, Pragmatism, and Anti-Authoritarianism
• 5 Marxism, Form, and the Negation of Aesthetic Synthesis
• 6 “Nothing Is Known—Only Realized”: Postcritique, Bruno Latour, and the Idea of a Positive Aesthetics
• 7 “I Turned to the Poets”: Humanist Stories of Progress
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page